Best Approaches

Hi Everyone, My development team and I are kind of new to programming with JSP, Java, XSL, XML, and Oracle. We are in the process of designing a system using JDeveloper and BC4J, and I had a few questions on the best approach to take for several items. Firstly, our system is going to have a quite a few drop down objects and we need to know the most efficient way of filling those lists. Should we hard code the drop downs in the XSL file or should be store them in XML files? We want to stay away from storing all these values in the database to avoid round trips to the server and ultimately using up more resources. We want to keep it at the middle tier. Secondly, we are also going to be using several multi-select objects throughout our system. We were thinking of using a similar control that alot of wizards use... Two list boxes with the ability to move items to and from those boxes. However, we are confused on how we should store those multi-selects in our database. How does one go about this? Finally, are there any advantages to having multiple packages within one system or project? I would greatly appreciate any input or suggestions on how any of you may be currently doing the things that I'm asking about. Your successes and failures... Thanks in advance. Jolene